Joshua Furst
Joshua Furst’s most recent book is the critically acclaimed novel Revolutionaries. He’s also the author of The Sabotage Café—named to the 2007 year-end best-of lists of the Chicago Tribune, the Rocky Mountain News and the Philadelphia City Paper, as well as being awarded the 2008 Grub Street Fiction Prize—Short People, a collection of stories, and with the illustrator Katy Wu, The Little Red Stroller, a picture book for children. His work has appeared in, among other periodicals, Esquire, A Public Space, The Baffler, The Chicago Tribune, BOMB, and The Forward, where he is a Contributing Editor.
From 1993 through 1998, he was an active participant in the New York alternative theatre scene. Among other accomplishments in this field, he helped organize and run Nada Theatre’s 1995 Obie award winning Faust Festival and was one of the producers of the 1998 New York RAT conference which brought experimental theatre artists from across the United States together for a week of performance and symposia. His plays include Whimper, Myn and The Ellipse and Other Shapes. They have been produced by numerous theatres, both in the United States and abroad, including PS122, Adobe Theatre Company, Cucaracha Theatre Company, HERE, The Demarco European Art Foundation, and Annex Theatre in Seattle.
He studied as an undergraduate at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, receiving a BFA in Dramatic Writing in 1993, and did graduate work at The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, from which he received an MFA with Honors in 2001.
Past Lives is an interview series with School of the Arts Writing faculty, students, and alumni who began their professional lives on different career paths. Here, we talk to Adjunct Associate Professor Joshua Furst about his time as an eight-year-old dramaturg, commercial art vs. self-expression, and finding your literary voice.